“fun”

I used to dig Greek mythology as a pimpleless child and one of the myths I recall more vividly is the one of Arachne^WP—I still remember my childish confusion and anger at the Greeks’ twisted moral sense.

Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.

I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe button^A, that immemorial “knoblike appendage^WP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.

With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial Revolutions^WP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”^WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).

One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factors^WP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter: the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18^th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.

But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-line^WP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’s^WP bitmap revolution¹ graphical interfaces^WP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors² and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”³ invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.

⁴

With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documents^EE together. So what if Ted Nelson^WP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?

The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.

George Orwell’s Why I Write. Genius.

I really digged those balls. I’m giving them away! :)

(Notice the “Give you a very interesting feeling” cute engrish^WP)

Oh boy, can you hear the whoosh yet again? For the first deadline (August 5) my excuse was mostly several huge, polished posts (1, 2, 3) that I just started pouring out possessedly one afternoon after another. For the second deadline (August 12—yesterday!), well, no excuse other than that I’m in thrall with Domburi, and despite sleepless nights (day? night? they’ve lost all meaning to me), I’m happily obsessing with details and trying all sorts of innovative things. I’ve reached a strange state of scripting satori: I’m writing HTML through Javascript like no one has before. I swear it’s so weird and powerful that in a way it’s funny. It’s big stuff.

So yes, it’s better to think of my previous Road Map as broad guidelines for what’s to come. Just trust me, when Domburi’s finally out (August 31), it’ll be heart-breakingly beautiful. Till then and thanks for keeping in touch.

I don’t know exactly when or how the thought came into my mind but this morning the epiphany was there: wouldn’t it be cool to see Gmail’s half MB Javascript source¹ a la matrix code view^IY? Indeed it would, and so for the next half hour I became a man posessed. It was amazingly easy (“ya sabiendo es facil”) to hack it up in JS and it makes for an interesting screensaver.

When I finished I realized it would be really easy to make my makeshift Matrix code generic and so here’s a quick stab at it. Type whatever text you want matrixified and a new window will (hopefully) popup with it. (Though be warned, it’s pretty rough, unpolished code and it’ll surely be too slow if you don’t have a fast computer.) Anyway, enjoy.

Now that I think of it, I’d seen similar contraptions before but this one is particularly elegant and interesting: you throw it in the air and it changes color! Pure witchcraft. And the forms—the forms!—are beautiful in that uniquely arresting way that only mathematics can give. It’s our generation’s geodesic dome^WP.

I remember one high school philosophy class where our fantastic teacher (James Kurtz) had nothing prepared but a smooth, solid piece of metal he had found inside his car engine. The assignment for the one-hour class was to write an essay on what we could infer from the alien civilization that created the artifact if we suddenly found it on its own on a faraway planet, with no cues whatsoever of its purpose. It was jolly good fun with a pretty nondescript ferrous blob, so I wonder what I’d have said had he brought this color-changing whatchamacallit.

To begin with, I guess it’s fair to assume such civilization had to know its math pat. Perhaps several alien PhDs went into the theory of this ball and its theoretical inspiration even carries the name of some great alien topologist^WP, à la Poincaré sphere^WP. I’d be willing to bet that they have computers, there’s no way they could have built this without CAD^WP. And the material itself, plastic, and the way it’s shaped, is nothing trivial—it shows some deep knowledge of chemistry, materials science^WP, and manufacturing techniques.

And had I known that the whole thing was available for the alien equivalent of one dollar in the alien equivalent of a flea-market, and that it had no application than to be amusing, well, I’d have gasped!

At any rate, don’t (don’t!) let my babbling discourage you, go buy one!